How to use audience segmentation to get more attendees and stronger engagement

Think about the audience for any of the events you organise.

Chances are, you’re not trying to appeal to one single audience at all, but rather to multiple, different audiences – all of whom have a shared interest in the topic you’re addressing.

And if you’ve ever tried to reach any of these different audiences with differentiated or personalised content based on what you think will motivate them specifically, well you’ve employed a marketing strategy called audience segmentation.

Go straight to the top of the class, because audience segmentation is one of the most powerful strategies you can deploy when it comes to the two top priorities every event marketer has:

• Get more of the right people to my event
• Captivate and engage those attendees during the event.

Audience segmentation used to involve lots of work and would tie up a huge percentage of an event team’s resources. But these days, smart integrated event marketing platforms make it relatively easy to connect with multiple different audiences on their own terms. And the results can be transformational.

Let’s take a look at how it works in practice.

What is audience segmentation?

At its most basic, audience segmentation is just the practice of splitting your target market for an event into smaller groups (or segments) based on shared characteristics.

These segments can then be used to create more targeted marketing campaigns and invitations, together with tailored messaging that resonates more deeply with specific groups because of factors like age, interests, geographic location, behaviour or simply the stage they’re at in the customer journey.

By segmenting your audience and using differentiated messaging in your marketing, you’re far more likely to craft communications that will motivate and engage key segments than if you create just one, overarching set of content for the whole target market.

Why? For two reasons.

Firstly, broad messaging tends to be too generic to inspire meaningful connection with individuals who are already inundated with communications from lots of other content providers every day. You have to cut through to the ideas and triggers that people care most about.

Secondly, different segments often respond better to different marketing channels. For older professionals, you might use email and LinkedIn. For a younger segment, maybe you rely more on Instagram and TikTok.

Audience segmentation can be applied in different ways by using insights about each unique subgroup. And not only can the segmentation be applied to event marketing, but also to how the event itself is run.

How can I use audience segmentation for my events?

Once you start to analyse your audience and break it down into logical subsets, you can begin to understand your customers and the specific needs, interests and motivations of each discrete segment.

Having identified the segments you care about, along with their aspirations and pain points, you can tailor your messaging and content to better reach each segment.

For example, at any business event, different audience segments will have different principal goals in terms of the value they expect. Vendors will be interested in sales and lead generation opportunities. Executives might be there for the networking and business intelligence opportunities. Entrepreneurs want to meet potential funders and propagate some thought leadership. Researchers might be focused on the educational value of the content itself, and the chance to question experts in the field.

One event, multiple motivations to be there.

Defining these motivations is the first step in researching your market and potential attendees. You can approach this in a number of ways, from analysing past event attendee data, to distributing pre-event surveys, or even setting up marketing pixels on your event website to track which visitors are attracted to which types of content in your blog, newsletter or agenda page.

Once you’ve figured out the who your audience comprises, it’s time to segment them.

Segmentation types

Marketing science has helpfully evolved a widely-used set of segmentation types that, while imperfect, are still a good starting point when it comes to mapping audience groups to messaging and preferences.

These are:

Demographic
Groups defined by age, gender identity, ethnicity, nationality, education and other similar characterisations.

Geographic
Location, language, time-zone. Could be as broad as the continent, or as narrow as the zip code.

Psychographic
Psychological traits encompassing factors like personality, interests, values and opinions.

Behavioural
How customers interact with your event, your website or your wider organisation.

Let’s say, for example, you’re running an international conference for cyber security professionals at a venue in California.

Tech is a traditionally male-dominated sector. Maybe the emails you send to women include a section on the special ‘Women who Code’ workshop you’ve organised, as well as featuring the female CEOs in your opening plenary.

The emails you send to people in Europe (or elsewhere in the US) might include a section on all the cool things about visiting California, because that’s part of the draw for them. And you might time those emails to go out mid-morning for their time zone.

The event attracts a mix of non-technical and highly technical attendees. The generalists get messaging about the business intelligence and networking opportunities, while the cryptographers get more details on the cutting-edge new encryption methods being presented by the dudes from MIT.

And previous attendees get a differentiated offer, rewarding their loyalty, while new prospects get a section educating them about why your event is different from other cyber security conferences.

This is just a starting point. Every event community is unique, and you can get as niche and as creative as you need to.

How can an event platform help me execute audience segmentation?

When it comes to putting your segmentation strategy into practice, a modern, integrated event marketing platform can be a game-changer – because it brings together multiple audience touchpoints (email, on-site engagement etc) with agenda building tools and contact management. All in one place, with a single source-of-truth.

As such, the right platform can make light work of event the most sophisticated segmentation strategy.

For example, AttendZen’s integrated event CRM lets you segment your organisation’s contact data using any combination of custom fields, data tags or behavioural insights and map segments to specific event campaigns.

Our email marketing engine then lets you build messages with conditional logic, such that different segments see tailored and personalised content, depending on what you know motivates them.

In other words, you can send a marketing email to 5,000 recipients, but each one will see slightly differentiated messaging based on the segment they’re in. For example, Business development people might get copy and images focusing on the important companies who attend and all the networking receptions. Academics will get the copy and images that sell the deep-dive technical presentations and hardware displays. And so on.

From there, detailed campaign analytics let you see the open, click-through and conversion rates for each segment and its associated messaging. Making it easy to double down on the stuff that resonates and adjust / re-think messaging to the weaker segments.

When it comes to the event itself, rich streams of engagement data can be harvested from the attendee app, personalised session-builder behaviours, session check-in actions and even live-polling, chat and Q&A.

Taken together, this data can be turned into incredibly powerful, actionable insights into what your attendees really care about, and what content and formats you should prioritise for a stronger, more profitable event over time.

The right event platform can capture and show you these insights, and empower you to act on them, without the need to plug in multiple complex third-party tools – with all the associated time and expense.

Events have never been more competitive. If you want to win, audience segmentation is one of the best things to invest your time in.

We love talking about this stuff, so feel free to reach out for a chat about who you’re trying to reach and what you’re doing to get there. If we can help with advice on using event tech to make your marketing more effective, we will!